It depends on the overall mission. In Iraq we had artillary units patrolling like 11b. They were pissed about it though...LOL
You can't be serious. Tankers are POGs like the rest. Who enters the room? Who pies the corner? Who throws a grenade back after they throw one at you? Who walks around in the open knowing that his buddy was KIAd by a sniper last week? **** if you think its tankers.
Cakewalks depend. We had a LT that took his plt into enemy sector with no armor assets. They got ambushed with several casualties. After that he was relieved and moved to BN as the BGDE liaison. It was the end of his career as a 1LT.
WTC is what we called PLDC. It's where I was on 9/11/2001. Our SGL brought a TV in and told the 11Bs to pack our rucks we are going back to our units. We thought it was a drill until he turned on the tv and saw the towers.
I spent a year of my time in BN s3. It was a learning experience. I learned how BN operations are planned and conducted, and I learned a bunch about commo, MI, FA, etc. Everything in a TOC. I was also part of the BN color guard. I was the National Colors bearer. It was a privilege. You miss out on the infantry stuff though. Infantry is the best job in the world.
I was in 9th grade but it's the reason I enlisted 11b. Actually, that, and the fact that if I chose the 11b slot I was going to ship to OSUT in a week which is what I wanted. Was young and didn't care about the mos
Whatever the reason, I have tremendous respect for anyone who signs up for the infantry. Your mission is to close with and destroy or capture the enemy by means of fire and maneuver. No one else does anything even close. Good luck brother.
THanks brother! Been 11b for 7 years and love it for the most part. I'm a bit on the skinnier side so rucking kinda sucks but never stopped me on patrol
The only thing that will help with road marching is more road marching. You can lift weights all you want, but if you aren't rucking once a week with at least 40 pounds (more for shorter distance), then you are not going to improve. I used to do time. I would put on some tunes and march for an hour or two on a Saturday morning. When I did my EIB I called cadence to myself the entire time. I came in right under 3 hours, and I wasn't even smoked. If you go active duty, eat in the chow hall, and stay away from fast food. Put most of the weight up in the radio pouch of your ruck so it's up on your shoulders and use your strap around your waste. You don't have to kill yourself every time either. Just going out once a week with a heavy ruck and walking for a couple of hours will drastically improve your endurance. Another thing you can do is wear your ruck every day. Just wear it around the house for an hour or two. Make it heavy as hell too. You will get accustomed to it.
That's a generalization. My CO in Iraq was an E-7 who went to OCS. He worked harder than anyone I have ever met in my life. He went on every single patrol, day and night, with each platoon. He was not a hard ass either. He treated us all with respect. I have never seen someone push themselves as hard as he did.
Hah, in your opinion. They are children who go straight to their unit after college. The best officers I know are enlisted soldiers, with time the field, who then commission.
Yea I need to get more motivated to be back on my rucking game. APFT isn't a problem, rucking can be though
Remember, if you want to be a leader, you have to be out front all the time. Your men will respect that, and they will not respect you if you are not out front. You don't have to be #1 at everything, but you have to be right there with #1.
Yea that's true. I had 2 great PLs that I liked the most. One I deployed with, the other state side. Both were very involved with the platoon and were not hardasses, but they were on us all the time. Kinda hard to explain. When the time came to go to work, they showed us how to handle pressure
Another thing to remember is that as a PL you have to trust your NCOs. The 1st time we got ambushed our PL looked around like a deer in the headlights. He needed someone to grab his chinstrap. He did fine after that because he trusted us.
Who was it that said Academy grads are the best? Couldn't have been me. Opinions Abolish West Point — and the other service academies, too Naval Academy midshipmen and West Point cadets don’t make better officers than their ROTC counterparts. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post) By Scott Beauchamp January 23, 2015 Scott Beauchamp is a veteran and a writer who lives in Portland, Maine. He contributes to the Baffler, the Atlantic and Al Jazeera, among other publications. Most Americans are familiar with the prestige that surrounds the United States military service academies. Various names and phrases, spoken like solemn incantations, attest to their sacrosanct status: the Point, the Long Gray Line, Annapolis, cadets. Their graduates constitute a who’s who of American greatness, including Ulysses Grant, Jimmy Carter, novelist James Salter and sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein, to name a few. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in a 1962 address at West Point, typified the veneration when he told the cadets that they were “the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense.” The service academies — the U.S. Military Academy for the Army (West Point), the U.S. Naval Academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy and the U.S. Coast Guard Academy — promise to educate and mold future officers charged with leading the enlisted members of the military. But they are not the hallowed arbiters of quality promised by their myths. Their traditions mask bloated government money-sucks that consistently underperform. They are centers of nepotism that turn below-average students into average officers. They are indulgences that taxpayers, who fund them, can no longer afford. They’ve outlived their use, and it’s time to shut them down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...61284a573f8_story.html?utm_term=.6a09537e212e
That's another opinion. I have served with several west point graduates, each of them were superior officers. I have also served under OCS appointees who were great. I have served under ROTC grads who could have got us all killed too.
When I was in, '66/'67/'68, without question the best infantry officers I saw were West Point graduates. Next was ROTC. Last was OCS. Of course this was in the middle of a war and the need for infantry officers was high. You could get into OCS with a GED if your other test scores were good enough. Now, that doesn't mean there weren't good OCS officers, or not so good West Point grads, or anywhere from good to bad ROTC grads. But by and large that rule of thumb held and every one knew it. So, apparently things have changed.
I can't say, but my CO during OIF II from 04-05 was an OCS grad, and he was great. I was infantry too, and all the West pointers were airborne ranger and outstanding leaders.
